Bloglines, a popular web-based RSS reader, announced that they have begun testing the waters of monetizing the service with display ads. If you login to the Bloglines start page, you may see an ad on the right hand side. In addition, if you conduct a search in Bloglines, you may see ads show up on the right hand side. It is important to note that these ads are not contextually driven, meaning the ads can have very little to do with your subscription list or your search query.

In addition to this announcement, Bloglines announced the release of a new skin to Bloglines Beta.

Here is a picture of the classic starter page:

Here is a picture of the ads on a Bloglines search result:

Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb and Matt Cutts’ FriendFeed post.

Related Topics: Ask: Bloglines

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz